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Hello all...This is my first journal entry...Me Barry and Chris flew into Toronto from Heathrow on the 11th October 2006 and what a place to start our adventure!! We booked into the Global Village Backpackers hostel in the centre of town and stayed there for 4 nights...wish it could have been longer. Toronto was a brilliant place to visit. The hostel had a bar open till 2am evey night and everybody ended up back there socialising and drinking and having fun. There was a great atmosphere to the hostel and to the city itself. We tried to do the touristy stuff but various things were closed when we were there so it was only the CN Tower that we actually did. We stood on the glass floor there (which was terrifying...it took me 15 minutes to walk out on it). Toronto was freezing so i bought a coat which will pop up in a number of upcoming photos. Mike gave me his tammy hat as well....cheers Mike. We got to meet up with my step-sister and her husband, the aforementioned Mike, who live near Toronto. We had a great night out with them and I got a steak cooked to 'perfection'. It wasn't my fault though...the menu said 'steak cooked to your perfection', so when the waitress asked "How would you like you steak cooked?" I replied "To perfection please....much to the mirth of everybody sitting around the table. Granted I maybe should have made a better recovery from this than saying to her..."well just cook it normally then". Eventually she was told to cook it medium....good grief. Helen didn't stop laughing for ages.
In truth Toronto was spent either drunk, hungover, or being freezing cold.....but I loved every second of it. Except for when I managed to walk into a ghetto on my own without realising it -until it was too late. I had to walk past a group of about 7 Black youths in hoody tops standing around in a circle directly in front of me. I had to walk through them to get past and could feel them all staring at me as they stopped speaking and watched me. When I got past them I noticed the graffiti on the pavement "WELCOME TO DA HOOD" ...excellent. I made my way straight to the nearest main road and hopped on a tram back into town...feeling very lucky.
We did a fair bit of wandering round the city centre. One time we visited the city court...we went into one of the court rooms where a woman was being tried for serious assault. It was amusing watching Chris panicking when I said it would be funny if his mobile phone went off.
We met loads of cool people in that hostel, including the band Commander Chameleon who were from Athens, Georgia, where we'd been 2 years ago. We all got free CD's from them, although I kept losing mine each night and having to ask for another the next day (their fault for giving me a CD when I'm drunk). We also met Frank from Ireland. I kept meeting him in the hostel and having conversations with him. Chris and Baz never met him though and thought he was my imaginary friend. But luckily on the last night they met him and my name was cleared. About 2 in the morning, three American rugby playing chicks offered me, Chris and Irish Frank wine and vodka back at their dorm.....needless to say we accepted and we were drinking and having a laugh until 6am. It was really great that we had to get up 3 hours later to go to check out of the hotel !!
I might as well mention that we spent one night in Niagara en route to Boston. Helen managed to wangle us a night in the Hilton Hotel there for $50...nice one. All I had to do was pretend that I worked for her if I was asked....no worries. As per usual we managed to make a mess of things during the day and turned up to the Maid of the Mist ride about 10 minutes after it closed. We all went to the casino that night which was next door and I managed to turn $40 into $168 pretty quickly at the poker tables, but I left because I had something better to do.
The next day we got on a bus to Boston...it took 19 hours as we had to detour via New York...not funny at all. To top it off when we did get to Boston, Barry said the hostel was only about 15 minutes away and we could walk it. Queue another 40 minutes of us trudging through Boston with heavy bags on our backs and long faces!! Well done Baz.
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